From day one Google has hated apps. It grudgingly built them because the iPhone and the culture of smartphones forced the company to. Now with Chrome notifications it has taken a very self-conscious step toward making apps less “essential.”
In a press meeting several years ago then Google Android boss Vic Gundotra and publisher/pundit Tim O’Reilly confidently but incorrectly predicted that apps would yield to the mobile web in a relatively short time.
Instead what we have today is a situation where users spend 60 percent of their digital media time with mobile devices (mostly smartphones) and almost 90 percent of that in apps. The mobile web has greater reach than most apps; but in terms of time spent it’s marginal.
Google doesn’t like this for obvious reasons.
Although it has several popular apps, Google is not the star of the mobile internet. Its relatively stable gatekeeping role on the PC has been replaced with an ongoing push to maintain mobile attention and usage. (On yesterday’s earnings call Google CFO Patrick Pichette said that the company is seeing “great momentum” in mobile search and mobile revenue.)
Make no mistake mobile search is widely used on smartphones and Google is dominant. But its position is not as central to mobile users. So-called navigational searches (not directions) and many types of category searches (e.g., restaurants, hotels) are diminished in mobile. People often go directly to relevant apps, without searching.
This is where Google’s “Physical Web” and Chrome notifications come in. The Physical Web project has declared war on apps:
The Physical Web is an approach to unleash the core superpower of the web: interaction on demand. People should be able to walk up to any smart device – a vending machine, a poster, a toy, a bus stop, a rental car – and not have to download an app first. Everything should be just a tap away.
The Physical Web is not shipping yet nor is it a Google product. This is an early-stage experimental project and we’re developing it out in the open as we do all things related to the web. This should only be of interest to developers looking to test out this feature and provide us feedback.
The number of smart devices is going to explode, and the assumption that each new device will require its own application just isn’t realistic. We need a system that lets anyone interact with any device at any time. The Physical Web isn’t about replacing native apps: it’s about enabling interaction when native apps just aren’t practical.
